miércoles, 8 de agosto de 2012

More food for thought!

More food for
thought!

This time I’ll focus on lesson planning and how I feel
about it.

To be honest, when I started working in Newlands I
thought: “What a burden! I’ll have to plan every lesson step by step!! I was
not used to doing it because I did not have to hand in any lesson planning at
the school where I worked before. Despite the fact that I did plan my lessons
in advance with my mate who taught the same year, I just wrote notes for each
day in a copybook which belonged to me and which nobody else read. Despite the
fact that I carefully thought about what I did and I reflected upon my teaching
and the progress of my students, nowadays I feel that I am becoming a much more
reflective teacher than I was before. Having to think about every step of a
lesson in order to write it down and having other people read it makes me think
even more about every detail, reflect upon the different alternatives I have and,
most importantly, set a USEFUL GOAL for every activity or move planned. Having
to think of the learning objective and having to give myself a sound reason for
including or leaving something aside makes me say to myself: “Will my students
learn from this?? Will they enjoy it? How can I improve this/ that???

Besides, I find that comments made on them can be
really positive and can make me see things from another point of view,
appreciate some aspects which I might have left aside or make some useful changes.

Many times when planning I think that I have to cater
for too many things at the same time (phonics workbook, circles, activities,
rehearsing, helping students who are behind, correcting copybooks and booklets
+ all the steps from an ordinary lesson) and that I have to make too many areas
fit in a short period of time but, well, I always try to do my best in order to
comply with them all, though sometimes, it’s a bit complicated and I have to
leave things aside and establish priorities.